The Bulbul London restaurant opening marks the first international venture for chef Rohan Dsouza and restaurateur Twinkle Keswani, the duo behind award-winning dining spots across Goa, Kerala, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Leh. Their chosen address is a 130-year-old former printing press at 25 Tudor Street, Blackfriars, now transformed into one of the capital’s more theatrically decorated dining rooms.
The interiors set the tone immediately: brushed velvet sofas, golden napkin holders, an indoor water fountain and a great deal of animal print, leopard pattern included. It is a lavish setting, deliberately opulent, and the contrast with what arrives on the plate is part of the point. The cooking reaches not for fine-dining formality but for the quieter authority of the Indian home kitchen, regional dishes from culinary traditions, as the team put it, ‘that have quietly endured for generations’.
A menu rooted in regional kitchens across India
The Bulbul London restaurant opening positions itself firmly around specificity of origin. Aunty Marie’s Goan Shrimp Balchao, for instance, is drawn from a home recipe described by the team as ‘the kind that exists nowhere written down’. The Mewari Laal Maas, a slow-braised lamb in bold red chilli and spiced gravy, is made using Mathania chillies that grow exclusively in the desert state of Rajasthan. These are not gestures towards regional India: they are the substance of the menu.
To run a kitchen of this scope, Bulbul has assembled three chefs, Dsouza included, each from a different region of the country. Dsouza himself began his career in London, working with Marco Pierre White, before building a portfolio of restaurants across India with Keswani. That trajectory, from London kitchens back to London via the subcontinent, gives the project a particular logic: this is not an outsider’s interpretation of Indian food, but a practitioner’s return.
The drinks list follows the same instinct for the unexpected. Classic formats get Indian inflections: the house Negroni is made with nannari-infused gin and sandalwood hydrosol. Alongside it sits a dedicated Indian gin section and a full Indian single malt selection, reflecting a broader moment in Indian spirits that London’s bar scene is only beginning to absorb.
Bulbul London: timeline, location and what to expect on arrival
The restaurant opened its doors in a soft launch phase, with Taste of London reporting a grand opening on 18 July at the Tudor Street address. The original timeline, as reported by Time Out, had pointed to 1 September as the official launch date, suggesting the restaurant moved its opening forward from that earlier target. Both accounts place Bulbul at 25 Tudor Street, EC4Y 0DD, a five-minute walk from Blackfriars station.
The building itself adds a layer of context that the cooking quietly echoes. A printing press that stood for 130 years before Dsouza and Keswani took it on, it carries the weight of a space that has always been in the business of putting something into the world. Keswani’s redesign does not erase that history so much as upholster it extravagantly, which may be the most honest thing the room does: acknowledging that transformation, however gilded, still rests on what came before.
Blackfriars is not the most obvious address for a first international outpost from a group with its roots in Goa and Kerala. But 25 Tudor Street sits in a pocket of the city where working London and visiting London briefly overlap, close enough to the Embankment to catch both. For Dsouza, who first learned the rhythms of a London kitchen working alongside Marco Pierre White, the return has a certain symmetry to it.
Bulbul is open now at 25 Tudor Street, EC4Y 0DD. Taste of London reports the grand opening took place on 18 July.